Dark Knight Megathread

[Beddict]

The GCD queues themselves will margin out nearly 250 ms of latency at 0 Skill Speed. By the time you add 2 seconds' duration (11.5 seconds true effective duration), you'd be able to get 5 strikes off at ~325 ms latency even at 0 Skill Speed.

See, I do think this would be fine. An 11.5s Blood Weapon is enough to allow an easy five Weaponskills with no risk of a sixth, and it provides just enough time for a five Spell Blood Weapon. Spells aren't exactly used in Raids, but it's always been annoying as hell that DRK struggles to get a five GCD Blood Weapon in AoE scenarios unless they are able to sub in a few uses of Quietus. However, people are typically asking for the Ammo system because it's an easy solution. It means DRK isn't getting screwed out of a fifth GCD when using Spells, it prevents a DRK from SkS stacking to try and get a sixth Blood Weapon for some reason, it gets rid of the current less than 10s duration that screws people with poor ping, and it's a system that SE is already leaning in on. Delirium Inner Release, and Requiescat are all moving to the Ammo system in Endwalker, and they already moved Bunshin over to it back in Patch 5.1, so why not give Blood Weapon the same treatment? Or buff the duration, who cares, both are viable options that are better than the current state of Blood Weapon.

[Shurrikhan]

However, people are typically asking for the Ammo system because it's an easy solution. It means DRK isn't getting screwed out of a fifth GCD when using Spells, it prevents a DRK from SkS stacking to try and get a sixth Blood Weapon for some reason, it gets rid of the current less than 10s duration that screws people with poor ping, and it's a system that SE is already leaning in on. Delirium Inner Release, and Requiescat are all moving to the Ammo system in Endwalker, and they already moved Bunshin over to it back in Patch 5.1, so why not give Blood Weapon the same treatment?

I get that; it just seems 5 steps sideways (complete with a bundle of very mixed precedents) to replace 1 step forward and one fine-detail correction.

The Spell Speed trait or merger ought to happen regardless, and Blood Weapon would never have been problematic in the first place if it were actually 10 seconds' long.

I'd rather not, in effect, remove durations and their gameplay over a mere "Why not?"

For instance, I'd have preferred that Bunshin remain a duration; it'd at least be that tiny bit less fire-and-forget and would allow it to still scale (albeit by particular thresholds) with Skill Speed. (Of course, much like with Living Shadow, I'd have rather have gone further with it, but that is outside our scope here.)

Hell, the prospect of getting one more GCD under a duration isn't a unique benefit of Skill Speed; it merely means that Skill Speed can provide some benefit, just as Direct Hit, Crit, and Determination already contribute -- albeit by relatively chunky thresholds. A capped effect count is just one more way to make Skill Speed even more of a trap stat. We shouldn't have trap stats, nor --so long as we're not going to balance stat weights individually for each job-- stats that are only valuable for jobs with little to no unscalable oGCD contribution.

It's worth noting here that durationed oGCDs like Raging Strike, No Mercy, and the like do scale with Skill Speed while skills like Drill, etc., effectively do not, because you still need to align them with Trick Attack, making any overclocking (forward drift) counterproductive.

We should, of course, set those thresholds at a equilibrium between compensating for latency at 0 Skill Speed (still easily getting our n hits out) and between feeling obliged to take a bit more Skill Speed and barely manage a n+1th hit (i.e., start at some n+0.5 hits' time, rather than a mere exact n hits or n+0.8 hits), especially if any player would be forced to double-weave within the particular duration. However, I don't think having some value for Skill Speed, for once, is a bad thing.